The Line Between AI-First and AI Theater - Follow Up Story
Letting product ownership be your guide
What happened after writing a recent Product Management IRL article? These insights are for paid subscribers to Product Management IRL.
This week’s backstory is about handling AI when it touches your product:
What Prompted This Article?
I got a comment on LinkedIn from Matthew Skelton, author of Team Topologies, about product managers drifting into AI Theater instead of using AI to improve our work:
Matthew’s comment resonated because product managers are conducting high-risk product experiments with AI. The risk comes from:
security gaps
intellectual property exposed to competitors
AI model mistakes
Matthew hit on another issue: AI experiments that don’t improve the outcome for the customer.
I saw this on a recent vibe coding experiment with the free resources for this newsletter. AI suggested adding alerts if the content gets older than 3 months. I almost made this code change.
Luckily, I took a break and remembered this is unnecessary.
I wrote this article to give thinking tools to product managers when AI-first overtakes our product instincts.
